Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Editor and Publisher reports that Digg.com, a Web site that ranks and displays news items based on recommendations from its users, is expanding to include video and topics beyond technology. Currently, users are limited to posting and reading items on security, digital music, robots and other tech-related categories.

Beginning Monday, they will be able to post and have access to world, business and entertainment news, along with non-news video. Games and science also will break out of the general technology section.

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The European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative is funding the NEW TIES project, which seeks to create a "computer society" of software agents capable of developing their own culture and language. From the intro of the feature story "Searching for the Soul in the Machine":

If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out.

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Well, looks like everyone’s second favorite social software is opening its pages to people who, like aren’t in school anymore. Seems like the Facebook crew is getting restless and looking to expand beyond the tower. Just think–pretty soon facebook junkies could get their fix in their cubicle, reliving those glory days of facebooking in the computer classroom (like OMG, why can’t that stupid prof buzz off??). And this will no doubt spur productivity. Oops–sorry, I’m shaky. Been ten minutes since I last facebooked. If you want your name written in the facebook of life, you gotta stay active and try to get random people to be friends with you and stuff.

Well, looks like everyone’s second favorite social software is opening its pages to people who, like aren’t in school anymore. Seems like the Facebook crew is getting restless and looking to expand beyond the tower. Just think–pretty soon facebook junkies could get their fix in their cubicle, reliving those glory days of facebooking in the computer classroom (like OMG, why can’t that stupid prof buzz off??). And this will no doubt spur productivity. Oops–sorry, I’m shaky. Been ten minutes since I last facebooked. If you want your name written in the facebook of life, you gotta stay active and try to get random people to be friends with you and stuff.

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NB: Mike Edwards contributed heavily to these notes. In fact, most of what’s here is his work, so I want him to get credit for it.

The CCCC Blogging SIG had a large and productive meeting Thursday night in
Chicago. We began by discussing some of the initiatives the SIG had proposed
the previous year, including the one-page paper handout guide for teachers new
to blogging (which, we might hope, will continue to be revised collaboratively and kept up to date as necessary), as well as thoughts about assessment of weblog writing,
outcomes of weblog use in writing courses and professional endeavors, and a possible large multi-institution study investigating the
classroom uses of weblogs.

Following the initial discussion, we split up into five small groups focusing on
action in specific areas. The groups discussed their areas and reported back when
we reconvened. Here are the results of our discussion:

Joystiq has a fun article about Geek Chic at the Game Developer Conference (GDC). Surprisingly enough, I expected to see exactly these stats. I’m just wondering if I’d qualify as a “hairy dude” and be part of that exclusive 9%…Or maybe I could just wear a PowerGlove and be that ONE dude at the conf with one. Hmm. BTW, if you want your C-64 retro shirt, it’s HERE. Very, very, suave…

Another plug, but I couldn’t resist after reading Matt Barton’s review of the Steven Johnson book a couple posts down. I’d like to alert Kairos readers to a thread recently begun at if:book — the blog of the institute for the future of the book — where we have mounted a multi-post, ongoing critique of EBIGFY, in which Johnson himself is participating. We were moved to do this after witnessing the near-universal acclaim the book has received since publication. We’ve already come across numerous instances of it being assigned as essential reading for new media and design classes, in some cases by teachers who haven’t even read it. It seemed time for a more rigorous discussion…

Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You is a quick read. It’s a few days’ worth of tub & toilet reading for folks like me who do 90% of their reading in the bathroom–the only room in their house without a computer or TV. EBiGfY is fun, well-written, and self-described as an “old-fashioned work of persuasion” (meaning that you’re not going to get the other side of the argument.) The basic idea is that popular culture media (television shows, videogames, films, the internet, etc.) have been steadily increasing in complexity (but not necessarily sophistication) since the 50s. He calls this “The Sleeper Curve,” a joke borrowed from a Woody Allen film. Johnson reveals that TV shows now have more characters, threads, and subplots. Games are so complicated you need a strategy guide just to beat them. Films haven’t changed as much as the rest of pop culture, but even there we can see how the LotR trilogy is far more complex than Star Wars. Not to put to find a point on it, kids and couch potatoes are sucking wholesome Vitamin D milk from their boob tubes.

I just read this article ref’d on Slashdot that claims “geek bloggers” are going extinct. The basic idea here is that since blogs have gone “mainstream,” the geeky blogs that started it all are falling in popularity. The article points out three generations of bloggers and, by extension, three audiences for these blogs. The first blogs were blogged by true geeks–after all, they’re the only ones who knew about blogging and had the know-how to deal with the primitive, user “unfriendly” interfaces of the early days. Later, of course, blogging got so simple until “anybody could do it,” and now blogging has gotten so mainstream that it’s no longer subsersive…CNN, Fox, ABC, etc., have their “bloggers” on payroll.